“Shake to [blank]* is the worst UX choice you could make for such a common action. I’ve been working with Expo on React Native a lot lately and “shake to exit your app” gets really old after the third or fourth time I have to do it within a five minute period. Shaking like that hurts my arm, and it’s not clear how much I have to shake it to get it to recognize.

That aside, far too often I give someone my phone to see something I’ve written and the process of handing it to them without either of us touching the screen often triggers the “shake to undo”. I can completely understand why graphical design apps don’t want to shake to undo. Not only does it move your device physically (and unnecessarily), you’re quite likely to hit the screen in the process.

Does turning off shake to undo expose some other way to undo? Being able to undo is pretty important, and I use it now and then, it’s just really annoying that the way to undo is physically shaking the device.

I’ve never actually seen anyone use “shake to undo”, and it’s a surprise every time I do it by accident. I think wiping your finger back and forth over the keyboard (as if you were scratching it out) would be a better idea.